The practice of
mass surveillance in the United States
dates back to WWI wartime monitoring and censorship
of international communications from, to, or which passed through the United States. After the First World War
and the Second World War, the surveillance continued, via programs such as the
Black Chamber
and Project SHAMROCK. The formation and growth of federal
law-enforcement
and intelligence agencies
such as the FBI,
CIA, and
NSA
institutionalized surveillance used to also silence political dissent, as evidenced by COINTELPRO
projects which targeted various organizations and individuals. During the Civil Rights Movement
era, many individuals put under surveillance orders were first labelled as integrationists then deemed subversive. Other targeted individuals and liberation movement groups include Native American activists, African American and Chicano liberation movement activists, and anti-war protesters.

The formation of the international UKUSA surveillance agreement of 1946 evolved into the
ECHELON
collaboration by 1955[1]
of five English-speaking nations, also known as the Five Eyes, and focused on interception of electronic communications, with substantial increases in domestic surveillance capabilities.[2]

Following the
September 11th attacks
of 2001, domestic and international mass surveillance capabilities escalated far beyond the levels permitted by the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Based upon annual presidential executive orders declaring a continued State of National Emergency, first signed by George W. Bush on September 14, 2001 and then continued on an annual basis by President Barack Obama,[3]
and upon several subsequent national security Acts including the USA PATRIOT Act, the PRECISE Act, and FISA Amendment Act's
PRISM
surveillance program, critics and political dissenters currently describe the effects of these acts, orders, and resulting database network of Fusion centers
as forming a veritable American police state that simply institutionalized the illegal COINTELPRO tactics used to assassinate dissenters and leaders from the 1950s onwards.[4][5][6][7]

Additional surveillance agencies, such as the DHS and the position of Director of National Intelligence have exponentially escalated mass surveillance since 2001. A series of
media reports in 2013
revealed more recent programs and techniques employed by the US intelligence community.[8][9]
Advances in computer and information technology allow the creation of huge national databases
that facilitate mass surveillance in the United States[10]
by DHS
managed Fusion centers, the CIA's Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) program, and the FBI's TSDB.

Mass surveillance databases are also cited as responsible for profiling Latino Americans and contributing to unethical
Self-deportation
techniques, or physical deportations by way of the DHS's ICEGang national database.[11]

During the
world war's of the 20th century, all international mail sent through the
U.S. Postal Service
and international cables sent through companies such as Western Union,
ITT, and
RCA
were sent under the surveillance authority of the Bureau of Investigation, later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation,[12]
and reviewed by the US military.[13]
During World War II, first the
War Department
and later the Office of Censorship
monitored "communications by mail, cable, radio, or other means of transmission passing between the United States and any foreign country".[14]
In 1942 this included the 350,000 overseas cables and telegrams and 25,000 international telephone calls made each week.[15]:144
"Every letter that crossed international or U.S'. territorial borders from December 1941 to August 1945 was subject to being opened and scoured for details."[14]

1919: The
Black Chamber, also known as the Cipher Bureau and MI-8, was the first U.S. peacetime cryptanalytic organization, jointly funded by the
U.S. Army
and the U.S. Department of State. It conducted peacetime decryption of material including diplomatic communications until 1929.[16][17]

Institutional domestic surveillance was founded in 1896 with the National Bureau of Criminal Identification, which evolved by 1908 into the Bureau of Investigation, operated under the authority of the Department of Justice. In 1935, the FBI had grown into an independent agency under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover whose staff, through the use of wire taps, cable taps, mail tampering, garbage filtering and infiltrators, prepared secret
FBI Index
Lists on more than 10 million people by 1939.[24]

Purported to be chasing 'communists' and other alleged subversives, the FBI used public and private pressure to destroy the lives of those it targeted during
McCarthyism, including those lives of the Hollywood 10 with the
Hollywood blacklist. The FBI's surveillance and investigation roles expanded in the 1950s while using the collected information to facilitate political assassinations, including the murders of
Fred Hampton
and Mark Clark in 1969. The FBI is also directly connected to the bombings, assassinations, and deaths of other people including Malcolm X
in 1963, Viola Liuzzo in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
in 1968, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash
in 1976, and Judi Bari
in 1990.

As the extent of the FBI's domestic surveillance continued to grow, many celebrities were also secretly investigated by the bureau, including:

First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt
– A vocal critic of Hoover and likened the FBI to an 'American Gestapo' for its Index lists.[25]
Roosevelt also spoke out against anti-Japanese prejudice during the second world war, and was later a delegate to the United Nations and instrumental in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The
3,000-page
FBI dossier on Eleanor Roosevelt reveals Hoover's close monitoring of her activities and writings, and contains retaliatory charges against her for suspected Communist activities.[26][27]

Marilyn Monroe
– Her FBI dossier begins in 1955 and continues up until the months before her death. It focuses mostly on her travels and associations, searching for signs of leftist views and possible ties to communism.[30]
Her ex-husband, Arthur Miller, was also monitored. Monroe's FBI dossier is "heavily censored", but a
"reprocessed" version
has been released by the FBI to the public.[30]

John Lennon
– In 1971, shortly after Lennon arrived in the United States
on a visa to meet up with anti-war activists, the FBI placed Lennon under surveillance, and the U.S. government tried to deport him from the country.[31]
At that time, opposition to the Vietnam War
had reached a peak and Lennon often showed up at political rallies to sing his anti-war anthem "Give Peace a Chance".[31]
The U.S. government argued that Lennon's 300 page
FBI dossier was particularly sensitive because its release may "lead to foreign diplomatic, economic and military retaliation against the United States",[32]
and therefore only approved a "heavily censored" version.[33]

Some of the greatest
historical figures
of the 20th century, including several U.S. citizens, were placed under warrantless surveillance for the purpose of character assassination
– a process that aims to destroy the credibility and reputation of a person, institution, or nation.

Center:
Martin Luther King, Jr., a leader of the
Civil Rights Movement, was the target of an intensive campaign by the FBI to "neutralize" him as an effective civil rights activist.[37]
A FBI memo recognized King to be the "most dangerous and effective Negro
leader in the country.",[38]
and the agency wanted to discredit him by collecting evidence to (unsuccessfully) prove that he had been influenced by communism.[38]

See also: The FBI kept a
dossier
on Albert Einstein (≈1,500 pages) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (≈17,000 pages). Due to a court order, however, some information has been removed and many other pages will not be released until the year 2027.[42]

President Johnson
asked the FBI to conduct "name checks" of his critics and members of the staff of his 1964 opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater. He also requested purely political intelligence on his critics in the Senate, and received extensive intelligence reports on political activity at the
1964 Democratic Convention
from FBI electronic surveillance.[44]

President Nixon
authorized a program of wiretaps which produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated to national security, including information about a Supreme Court justice.[44]

A quarter of a million first class letters were opened and photographed by the CIA from 1953 to 1973.[44]

Millions of private
telegrams
sent from, to, or through the United States were obtained by the National Security Agency
(NSA), under a secret arrangement with U.S. telegraph companies, from 1947 to 1975.[44]

Over 100,000 Americans have been indexed in
U.S. Army
intelligence files.[44]

About 300,000 individuals were indexed in a CIA computer system during the course of
Operation CHAOS.[44]

Intelligence files on more than 11,000 individuals and groups were created by the
Internal Revenue Service
(IRS), with tax investigations "done on the basis of political rather than tax criteria".[44]

In response to the committee's findings, the
FISA Court
was established by the United States Congress
to issue surveillance warrants.[45]
Several decades later in 2013, the presiding judge of the FISA Court, Reggie Walton, told
The Washington Post
that the court only has a limited ability to supervise the government's surveillance, and is therefore "forced" to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided by federal agents.[46]

On August 17, 1975 Senator Frank Church stated on NBC's "Meet the Press" without mentioning the name of the NSA about this agency:

“

In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything — telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.[47][48][49]

By the 1990s the ECHELON system could intercept satellite transmissions,
public switched telephone network
(PSTN) communications (including most Internet traffic), and transmissions carried by microwave. The New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager
provided a detailed description of ECHELON in his 1996 book Secret Power. While some member governments denied the existence of ECHELON, a report by a committee of the
European Parliament
in 2001 confirmed the program's use and warned Europeans about its reach and effects.[52]
The European Parliament stated in its report that the term "ECHELON" occurred in a number of contexts, but that the evidence presented indicated it was a signals-intelligence collection system capable of interception and content-inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data-traffic globally.[51]

James Bamford
further described the capabilities of ECHELON in Body of Secrets
(2002) about the National Security Agency.[53]
Intelligence monitoring of citizens, and their communications, in the area covered by the AUSCANNZUKUS security agreement have, over the years, caused considerable public concern.[54][55]

On 1 January 2006, days after The New York Times
wrote that "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,[57]
the President emphasized that "This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America. And I repeat, limited."[58]

In the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, bulk domestic spying in the United States increased dramatically. The desire to prevent future attacks of this scale led to the passage of the
Patriot Act. Later acts include the
Protect America Act
(which removes the warrant requirement for government surveillance of foreign targets)[59]
and the FISA Amendments Act
(which relaxed some of the original FISA court requirements).

In 2002, "Total Information Awareness" was established by the U.S. government in order to "revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists".[60]

Also in 2005, the existence of
STELLARWIND
was revealed by Thomas Tamm. In 2006,
Mark Klein
revealed the existence of Room 641A
that he had wired back in 2003.[61]
In 2008, Babak Pasdar, a computer security expert, and CEO of Bat Blue
publicly revealed the existence of the "Quantico circuit", that he and his team found in 2003. He described it as a back door to the federal government in the systems of an unnamed wireless provider; the company was later independently identified as Verizon.[62]

The NSA's database of American's phone calls was made public in 2006 by USA Today
journalist Leslie Cauley in an article titled, "NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls."[63]
The article cites anonymous sources that described the program's reach on American citizens: "...it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others. The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks." The report failed to generate discussion of privacy rights in the media and was not referenced by Greenwald or the Washington Post in any of their reporting.

In 2009,
The New York Times
cited several anonymous intelligence officials alleging that "the N.S.A. made Americans targets in eavesdropping operations based on insufficient evidence tying them to terrorism" and "the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant".[64]

On 15 March 2012, the American magazine
Wired
published an article with the headline "The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)",[65]
which was later mentioned by U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson
during a congressional hearing. In response to Johnson's inquiry, NSA director Keith B. Alexander
testified that these allegations made by Wired
magazine were untrue:

RepresentativeJohnson: "The author of the
Wired
magazine article, his name is James Bashford, [sic] he writes that NSA has software that “searches U.S. sources for target addresses, locations, countries and phone numbers as well as watchlisted names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on the agency watchlists are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.” Is this true?"

On 6 June 2013, Britain's
The Guardian
newspaper began publishing a series of revelations by an unnamed American whistleblower, revealed several days later to be former CIA and NSA-contracted systems analyst Edward Snowden. Snowden gave a cache of internal documents in support of his claims to two journalists:
Glenn Greenwald
and Laura Poitras, Greenwald later estimated that the cache contains 15,000 – 20,000 documents, some very large and very detailed, and some very small.[67][68]
This was one of the largest news leaks
in the modern history of the United States.[69]
In over two months of publications, it became clear that the NSA operates a complex web of spying programs which allow it to intercept internet and telephone conversations from over a billion users from dozens of countries around the world. Specific revelations have been made about China, the European Union, Latin America, Iran and Pakistan, and Australia and New Zealand, however the published documentation reveals that many of the programs indiscriminately collect bulk information directly from central servers and internet backbones, which almost invariably carry and reroute information from distant countries.

Due to this central server and backbone monitoring, many of the programs overlap and interrelate among one another. These programs are often done with the assistance of US entities such as the
United States Department of Justice
and the FBI,[70]
are sanctioned by US laws such as the FISA Amendments Act, and the necessary court orders for them are signed by the secret
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In addition to this, many of the NSA's programs are directly aided by national and foreign intelligence services, Britain's
GCHQ
and Australia's DSD, as well as by large private telecommunications and internet corporations, such as
Verizon,
Telstra,[71]Google
and Facebook.[72]

"They (the NSA) can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer."

The US district court judge for the District of Columbia, Richard Leon, declared[76][77][78][79][80][81]
on December 16, 2013 that the mass collection of metadata of Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency probably violates the fourth amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.[82]
“Given the limited record before me at this point in the litigation – most notably, the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics – I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism.”[83]
“Plaintiffs have a substantial likelihood of showing that their privacy interests outweigh the government’s interest in collecting and analysing bulk telephony metadata and therefore the NSA’s bulk collection program is indeed an unreasonable search under the fourth amendment,” he wrote.[83]

"The Fourth Amendment typically requires 'a neutral and detached authority be interposed between the police and the public,' and it is offended by 'general warrants' and laws that allow searches to be conducted 'indiscriminately and without regard to their connections with a crime under investigation,'" he wrote.[84]
He added: "I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval. Surely such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Indeed I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison, who cautioned us to beware 'the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power,' would be aghast."[84]

Leon granted the request for a preliminary injunction that blocks the collection of phone data for two private plaintiffs (Larry Klayman, a conservative lawyer, and Charles Strange, father of a cryptologist killed in Afghanistan when his helicopter was shot down in 2011)[83]
and ordered the government to destroy any of their records that have been gathered. But the judge stayed action on his ruling pending a government appeal, recognizing in his 68-page opinion the “significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues.”[82]

On 20 May 2014,
U.S. Representative
for Michigan's 8th congressional district
Republican congressman Mike Rogers
introduced Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015 with the goal of authorizing appropriations for fiscal years 2014 and 2015 for intelligence and intelligence-related activities of the United States Government, the Community Management Account, and the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) Retirement and Disability System, and for other purposes.

Some of its measures cover the limitation on retention.--A covered communication (meaning any nonpublic telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage) shall not be retained in excess of 5 years, unless:(i) the communication has been affirmatively determined, in whole or in part, to constitute foreign intelligence or counterintelligence or is necessary to understand or assess foreign intelligence or counterintelligence; (ii) the communication is reasonably believed to constitute evidence of a crime and is retained by a law enforcement agency; (iii) the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning; (iv) all parties to the communication are reasonably believed to be non-United States persons; (v) retention is necessary to protect against an imminent threat to human life, in which case both the nature of the threat and the information to be retained shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees not later than 30 days after the date such retention is extended under this clause; (vi) retention is necessary for technical assurance or compliance purposes, including a court order or discovery obligation, in which case access to information retained for technical assurance or compliance purposes shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees on an annual basis; or (vi) retention is necessary for technical assurance or compliance purposes, including a court order or discovery obligation, in which case access to information retained for technical assurance or compliance purposes shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees on an annual basis; or (vii) retention for a period in excess of 5 years is approved by the head of the element of the intelligence community responsible for such retention, based on a determination that retention is necessary to protect the national security of the United States, in which case the head of such element shall provide to the congressional intelligence committees a written certification describing-- (I) the reasons extended retention is necessary to protect the national security of the United States; (II) the duration for which the head of the element is authorizing retention; (III) the particular information to be retained; and (IV) the measures the element of the intelligence community is taking to protect the privacy interests of United States persons or persons located inside the United States.[85]

The
USA Freedom Act
was signed into law on June 2, 2015, the day after certain provisions of the Patriot Act had expired. It mandated an end to bulk collection of phone call metadata by the NSA within 180 days, but allowed continued mandatory retention of metadata by phone companies with access by the government with case-by-case approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.[87]

Under the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, the U.S. Postal Service photographs the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces in 2012. The U.S. Postmaster General stated that the system is primarily used for mail sorting, but the images are available for possible use by law enforcement agencies.[88]
Created in 2001 following the anthrax attacks that killed five people, it is a sweeping expansion of a 100-year-old program called "mail cover" which targets people suspected of crimes. Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency gives to telephone calls, e-mail, and other forms of electronic communication.[89]

Mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days. Images captured under the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program are retained for a week to 30 days and then destroyed.[88]
There are two kinds of mail covers: those related to criminal activity and those requested to protect national security. Criminal activity requests average 15,000 to 20,000 per year, while the number of requests for national security mail covers has not been made public. Neither the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program nor the mail cover program require prior approval by a judge. For both programs the information gathered is metadata from the outside of the envelope or package for which courts have said there is no expectation of privacy. Opening the mail to view its contents would require a
warrant
approved by a judge.[89]

The
Total Information Awareness
program, of the Information Awareness Office, was formed in 2002 by the Pentagon and led by former rear admiral John Poindexter.[91]
The program designed numerous technologies to be used to perform mass surveillance. Examples include advanced speech-to-text
programs (so that phone conversations can be monitored en-masse by a computer, instead of requiring human operators to listen to them), social network analysis
software to monitor groups of people and their interactions with each other, and "Human identification at a distance" software which allows computers to identify people on surveillance cameras by their facial features and gait (the way they walk). The program was later renamed "Terrorism Information Awareness", after a negative public reaction.

In 1999 two models of
mandatory data retention
were suggested for the US. The first model would record the IP address
assigned to a customer at a specific time. In the second model, "which is closer to what Europe adopted", telephone numbers dialed, contents of Web pages visited, and recipients of e-mail messages must be retained by the ISP
for an unspecified amount of time.[95][96]
In 2006 the International Association of Chiefs of Police
adopted a resolution calling for a "uniform data retention mandate" for "customer subscriber information and source and destination information."[97]
The U.S. Department of Justice
announced in 2011 that criminal investigations "are being frustrated" because no law currently exists to force Internet providers to keep track of what their customers are doing.[98]

The
Electronic Frontier Foundation
has an ongoing lawsuit (Hepting v. AT&T) against the telecom giant
AT&T Inc.
for its assistance to the U.S. government in monitoring the communications of millions of American citizens. It has managed thus far to keep the proceedings open. Recently the documents, which were exposed by a whistleblower who had previously worked for AT&T, and showed schematics of the massive data mining system, were made public.[99][100]

The FBI developed the computer programs "Magic Lantern" and
CIPAV, which it can remotely install on a computer system, in order to monitor a person's computer activity.[101]

The NSA has been gathering information on financial records, internet surfing habits, and monitoring e-mails. It has also performed extensive surveillance on
social networks
such as Facebook.[102]
Recently, Facebook has revealed that, in the last six months of 2012, they handed over the private data of between 18,000 and 19,000 users to law enforcement of all types—including local police and federal agencies, such as the FBI, Federal Marshals and the NSA.[103]
One form of wiretapping utilized by the NSA is RADON, a bi-directional host tap that can inject Ethernet packets onto the same target. It allows bi-directional exploitation of Denied networks using standard on-net tools. The one limitation of RADON is that it is a USB device that requires a physical connection to a laptop or PC to work. RADON was created by a Massachusetts firm called Netragard. Their founder, Adriel Desautels, said about RADON, “it is our ‘safe’ malware. RADON is designed to enable us to infect customer systems in a safe and controllable manner. Safe means that every strand is built with an expiration date that, when reached, results in RADON performing an automatic and clean self-removal.”[citation needed]

Since the
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, a vast domestic intelligence apparatus has been built to collect information using FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators. The intelligence apparatus collects, analyzes and stores information about millions of (if not all) American citizens, most of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Every state and local law enforcement agency is to feed information to federal authorities to support the work of the FBI.[104]

The
PRISM
special source operation system was enabled by the Protect America Act of 2007
under President Bush and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which legally immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with US intelligence collection and was renewed by Congress under President Obama in 2012 for five years until December 2017. According to
The Register, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 "specifically authorizes intelligence agencies to monitor the phone, email, and other communications of U.S. citizens for up to a week without obtaining a warrant"[citation needed]
when one of the parties is outside the U.S.

PRISM was first publicly revealed on 6 June 2013, after classified documents about the program were leaked to
The Washington Post
and The Guardian
by Edward Snowden.

In early 2006,
USA Today
reported that several major telephone companies were cooperating illegally with the National Security Agency
to monitor the phone records of U.S. citizens, and storing them in a large database known as the NSA call database. This report came on the heels of allegations that the
U.S. government
had been conducting electronic surveillance of domestic telephone calls without warrants.[105]

Law enforcement and intelligence services in the United States possess technology to remotely activate the microphones in cell phones in order to listen to conversations that take place nearby the person who holds the phone.[106][107][108]

U.S. federal agents regularly use mobile phones to collect location data. The geographical location of a mobile phone (and thus the person carrying it) can be determined easily (whether it is being used or not), using a technique known
multilateration
to calculate the differences in time for a signal to travel from the cell phone to each of several cell towers
near the owner of the phone.[109][110]

As worldwide sales of
smartphones
began exceeding those of feature phones, the NSA decided to take advantage of the smartphone boom. This is particularly advantageous because the smartphone combines a
myriad
of data that would interest an intelligence agency, such as social contacts, user behavior, interests, location, photos and credit card
numbers and passwords.[111]

An internal NSA report from 2010 stated that the spread of the smartphone has been occurring "extremely rapidly"—developments that "certainly complicate traditional target analysis."[111]
According to the document, the NSA has set up task forces
assigned to several smartphone manufacturers and operating systems, including
Apple Inc.'s
iPhone
and iOS
operating system, as well as Google's
Android
mobile operating system.[111]
Similarly, Britain's GCHQ
assigned a team to study and crack the BlackBerry.[111]

The
FBI
collected nearly all hotel, airline, rental car, gift shop, and casino records in Las Vegas
during the last two weeks of 2003. The FBI requested all electronic data of hundreds of thousands of people based on a very general lead for the Las Vegas New Year's celebration. The Senior VP of The Mirage
went on record with PBS'
Frontline
describing the first time they were requested to help in the mass collection of personal information.[113]

Wide Area Persistent Surveillance (also Wide Area Motion Imaging) is a form of airborne surveillance system that collects pattern-of-life data by recording motion images of an area larger than a city – in sub-meter resolution. This video allows for anyone within the field of regard to be tracked – both live and retroactively, for forensic analysis. The use of sophisticated tracking algorithms applied to the WAMI dataset also enables mass automated geo-location tracking of every vehicle and pedestrian.[114]
WAMI sensors are typically mounted on manned airplanes, drones, blimps and aerostats. WAMI is currently in use on the souther border of the USA and has been deployed in Baltimore,[115]
Dayton Ohio as well as in Los Angeles, specifically targeting Compton. Wide Area Persistent Surveillance systems such as ARGUS WAMI
are capable of live viewing and recording a 68< square mile area with enough detail to view pedestrians and vehicles and generate chronographs[116]
These WAMI cameras, such as Gorgon Stare, Angelfire, Hiper Stare, Hawkeye and ARGUS,[117]
create airborne video so detailed that pedestrians can be followed across the city through forensic analysis. This allows investigators to rewind and playback the movements of anyone within this 68 square mile area for hours, days or even months at a time depending on the airframe the WAMI sensors are mounted on. JLENS, a surveillance aerostat scheduled for deployment over the east coast of the USA, is a form of WAMI that uses sophisticated radar imaging along with electro-optical WAMI sensors to enable mass geo-location tracking of ground vehicles.

While a resistance to the domestic deployment of WAMI has emerged in areas where the public has learned of the technologies use, the deployments have been intentionally hidden from the public, as in Compton California, where the mayor learned about the surveillance[118]
from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union,[119]
Teame Zazzu[114]
and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

PeSEAS[120]
and PerMIATE[121]
software automate and record the movement observed in the WAMI
video.[122]
This technology uses software to track and record the movements of pedestrians and vehicles using automatic object recognition software across the entire frame, generating "tracklets" or chronographs of every car and pedestrian movements. 24/7 deployment of this technology has been suggested by the DHS on spy blimps such as the recently killed Blue Devil Airship.[123]

Traffic cameras, which were meant to help enforce traffic laws at intersections, have also sparked some controversy, due to their use by law enforcement agencies for purposes unrelated to traffic violations.[124]
These cameras also work as transit choke-points that allow individuals inside the vehicle to be positively identified and license plate data to be collected and time stamped for cross reference with airborne WAMI
such as ARGUS and HAWKEYE used by police and Law Enforcement.[125]

Earlier in 2012, Congress passed a US$63 billion bill that will grant four years of additional funding to the
Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA). Under the bill, the FAA is required to provide military and commercial drones with expanded access to U.S. airspace by October 2015.[129]

In February 2013, a spokesman for the
Los Angeles Police Department
explained that these drones would initially be deployed in large public gatherings, including major protests. Over time, tiny drones would be used to fly inside buildings to track down suspects and assist in investigations.[130]
According to The Los Angeles Times, the main advantage of using drones is that they offer "unblinking
eye-in-the-sky
coverage". They can be modified to carry high-resolution video cameras, infrared sensors,
license plate readers, listening devices, and be disguised as
sea gulls
or other birds to mask themselves.[130]

By 2020, about 30,000 unmanned drones are expected to be deployed in the United States for the purpose of surveillance and
law enforcement.[131]

The "five eyes" of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States

During
World War II, the
BRUSA Agreement
was signed by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom for the purpose of intelligence sharing. This was later formalized in the UKUSA Agreement
of 1946 as a secret treaty. The full text of the agreement was released to the public on 25 June 2010.[136]

Although the treaty was later revised to include other countries such as Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Turkey, and the Philippines,[136]
most of the information sharing is performed by the so-called "Five Eyes",[137]
a term referring to the following English-speaking western democracies
and their respective intelligence agencies:

– The National Security Agency
of the United States, which has the biggest budget and the most advanced technical abilities among the "five eyes".[137]

In 2013, media disclosures revealed how other government agencies have cooperated extensively with the "Five Eyes":

– The Politiets Efterretningstjeneste
(PET) of Denmark, a domestic intelligence agency, exchanges data with the NSA on a regular basis, as part of a secret agreement with the United States.[138]

– The Bundesnachrichtendienst
(Federal Intelligence Service) of Germany systematically transfers metadata from German intelligence sources to the NSA. In December 2012 alone, Germany provided the NSA with 500 million metadata records.[139]
The NSA granted the Bundesnachrichtendienst access to X-Keyscore,[140]
in exchange for Mira4 and Veras.[139]
In early 2013, Hans-Georg Maaßen, President of the German domestic security agency
BfV, made several visits to the headquarters of the NSA. According to
classified
documents of the German government, Maaßen had agreed to transfer all data collected by the BfV via XKeyscore to the NSA.[141]
In addition, the BfV has been working very closely with eight other U.S. government agencies, including the CIA.[142]

Top secret
documents leaked by Edward Snowden
revealed that the "Five Eyes" have gained access to the majority of internet and telephone communications flowing throughout Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world.Left:
SEA-ME-WE 3, which runs across the
Afro-Eurasiansupercontinent
from Japan to Northern Germany, is one of the most important
submarine cables
accessed by the "Five Eyes". Singapore, a former British colony in the Asia-Pacific region (blue dot), plays a vital role in intercepting internet and telecommunications traffic heading from Australia/Japan to Europe, and vice versa. An intelligence sharing agreement between Singapore and Australia allows the rest of the "Five Eyes" to gain access to SEA-ME-WE 3.[145]Right:TAT-14, a telecommunications cable linking Europe with the United States, was identified as one of few assets of "Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources" of the USA on foreign territory. In 2013, it was revealed that British officials "pressured a handful of telecommunications and internet companies" to allow the British government to gain access to
TAT-14.[148]

Aside from the "Five Eyes", most other Western countries are also participating in the NSA surveillance system and sharing information with each other.[149]
However, being a partner of the NSA does not automatically exempt a country from being targeted by the NSA. According to an internal NSA document leaked by Snowden, "We (the NSA) can, and often do, target the signals of most 3rd party foreign partners."[150]

Most of the
NSA's collected data
which was seen by human eyes (i.e., used by NSA operatives) was used in accordance with the stated objective of combating terrorism.[153][154][155]

Other than to combat terrorism, these surveillance programs have been employed to assess the foreign policy and economic stability of other countries.[156]

According to reports by Brazil's O Globo newspaper, the collected data was also used to target "commercial secrets".[157]
In a statement addressed to the National Congress of Brazil, journalist
Glenn Greenwald
testified that the U.S. government uses counter-terrorism
as a "pretext" for clandestine surveillance in order to compete with other countries in the "business, industrial and economic fields".[158][159][160]

In an interview with
Der Spiegel
published on 12 August 2013, former NSA Director Michael Hayden
admitted that "We [the NSA] steal secrets. We're number one in it". Hayden also added that "We steal stuff to make you safe, not to make you rich".[156]

According to documents seen by the news agency
Reuters, information obtained in this way is subsequently funnelled to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.[161]
Federal agents are then instructed to "recreate" the investigative trail in order to "cover up" where the information originated,[161]
known as parallel construction. (Were the true origins known, the evidence and resulting case might be invalidated as "fruit of the poisonous tree", a legal doctrine designed to deter
abuse of power
that prevents evidence
or subsequent events being used in a case if they resulted from a search or other process that does not conform to legal requirements.)

According to NSA Chief Compliance Officer John DeLong, most violations of the NSA's rules were self-reported, and most often involved spying on personal
love interests
using surveillance technology of the agency.[162]

^"Eleanor Roosevelt".
History (U.S. TV channel). Retrieved
18 September
2013.
J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972), the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, considered Eleanor Roosevelt’s liberal views dangerous and believed she might be involved in communist activities. He ordered his agents to monitor Roosevelt and keep what became an extensive file on her.

^"Albert Einstein: Fact or Fiction?".
History (U.S. TV channel). Retrieved
17 September
2013.
Because of his controversial political beliefs-his support for socialism, civil rights, and nuclear disarmament, for example-many anti-Communist crusaders believed that Einstein was a dangerous subversive. Some, like FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, even thought he was a spy. For 22 years, Hoover's agents tapped Einstein's phones, opened his mail, rifled through his trash and even bugged his secretary's nephew's house, all to prove that he was more radical (as his 1,500-page FBI dossier noted) than "even Stalin himself."

^"'Life Lessons' From a White House Plumber".
NPR.
When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, the Nixon White House tried to discredit him. Among other things, Nixon loyalists burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

^"The Watergate Story".
The Washington Post. Retrieved
17 September
2013.
The White House "plumbers" unit – named for their orders to plug leaks in the administration – burglarizes a psychiatrist's office to find files on Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

^"Ex-CIA employee source of leak on PRISM program".
France 24. Retrieved
17 September
2013.
Snowden’s decision to reveal his identity and whereabouts lifts the lid on one of the biggest security leaks in US history and escalates a story that has placed a bright light on Obama’s extensive use of secret surveillance.

^The first three days of revelations were: the FISC court order that Verizon provide bulk metadata on its customers to the NSA; presentation slides explaining the cooperation of nine US internet giants through the PRISM program; and the bulk collection of Chinese users' text messages, which coincided with
Xi Jinping's visit to California to meet
Barack Obama.

^Declan McCullagh (23 April 2008).
"FBI, politicos renew push for ISP data retention laws".
CNET. CBS Interactive. Retrieved
17 March
2009.
Based on the statements at Wednesday's hearing and previous calls for new laws in this area, the scope of a mandatory data retention law remains fuzzy. It could mean forcing companies to store data for two years about what Internet addresses are assigned to which customers (Comcast said in 2006 that it would be retaining those records for six months).

^Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach & Holger Stark.
"Ally and Target: US Intelligence Watches Germany Closely".
Der Spiegel. Retrieved
29 August
2013.
The NSA classifies about 30 other countries as "3rd parties," with whom it cooperates, though with reservations. Germany is one of them. "We can, and often do, target the signals of most 3rd party foreign partners," the secret NSA document reads.

^"Liberty and Security in a Changing World"(PDF). Whitehouse.gov. Retrieved
21 July
2015.
since the enactment of section 702, the Committee “has not identified a single case in which a government official engaged in a willful effort to circumvent or violate the law.